Friday, November 07, 2014

Should progressives form their own political party?

Is it time for progressives to start their own political party?
As author Frank Rich pointed out in yesterday’s Salon, Democrats will likely do
what they always do after a political drubbing and that is to run toward the ideological
center. The flawed thinking goes like this: Republicans won big. That must mean
that voters want more conservative candidates. No. That isn’t what it means. Republicans
won because a lot of old white guys voted and whole lot of younger, more
liberal adults didn’t. Why? There are lots of reasons, but a major one is that
today’s Democrats don’t sound all that different than Republicans. What’s the
distinction, young voters ask?

There are distinctions, but instead of using those points of
difference to their advantage in campaigns, Democrats run screaming from them
and hide behind squishy rhetoric and cautious pronouncements. Please, whatever
you do, don’t call me a “liberal.” Obama? Who’s Obama? Why don’t Democrats take
their lesson from Minnesota? Al Franken is an unapologetic liberal, and he’s
won two elections. Voters had a distinct choice in the mid-term between a true
conservative and a true liberal, and they chose Franken. Isn’t there something
that can be learned here?

I like the idea of a new progressive political party. It
doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s agenda, and third parties do have a history of
failure, but there are a lot of progressives who feel that the Democratic Party
has already written them off, so why not have our own soapbox? We could start
by supporting and funding Bernie Sanders’ or Elizabeth Warren’s run for the
White House in 2016.